Oakland real estate keeps heating up

If you want cold, hard numbers illustrating Oakland’s economic revival, look no further than the city’s sizzling real estate market.

Oakland has 11,000 housing units in the works, Mayor-Elect Libby Schaaf told Bloomberg News last week. Most of those proposed homes are in the early stages of City Hall’s permitting and approval process, but Schaaf said she expects they will be built and that Oakland has space for even more in the coming years.

Also in the works is the Lake Merritt Station Area plan, which would add nearly 5,000 housing units and more than a million square feet of office space over the next 25 years in the neighborhood next to Chinatown and Laney College.

But for the fight to keep Oakland’s sports teams in town, these countless articles and statistics show that the city’s doubters are wrong. The real estate market is further proof that Oakland’s economy is more than strong enough to be a viable, 21st-century sports town. It’s pretty simple: If there are hundreds of thousands of East Bay residents who can afford a $1 million home, they very likely can afford A’s season tickets. And many of them would buy A’s tickets now if they were properly courted and marketed to by the A’s ownership.

In spite of what you may have heard, Oakland has always had the economic strength of a major league city. But Oakland’s fast-rising real estate market and its plans to add more than 10,000 new units in coming years remove all doubt.